Removing or making war decs more expensive, sounds like a carebear route for a PvP MMO. Decs are expensive enough, changing it anymore will make so that the small corps that want to war Dec people can’t because your burning the wallet already, and letting these big box alliance’s win with being able to carpet Dec…

Killing the actions of small group warfare doesn’t add to player retention… It actually hurts this.

And as an inexperienced person with the Merc side of things or way of life in eve I cannot in good conscience say you have a vote…

it’s a rough idea, but the aim is to limit or remove the option to blanket dec half of eve. or at least incentivizing real pvp and engaging in good fights, providing an opportunity to actually engage groups or cause fights. not just lets camp trade hubs for noobs. The challenge as you have pointed out is developing a plan for eliminating the abuse by the large groups while preserving good gameplay that exists under the current conditions.

This being the case lets talk costs, 50 million isk as mentioned earlier equates out to 48 cents for a week of war. Or 2 hours of pve running level 4s, or 30 minutes of incursion running. this feels low to me? am I off base here? just ran a claw fleet up to horde space last night and shat away 150mil of my cash in 3 ships just cause. 50 mil to effect 50 toons or less for a week doesn’t seem balanced?

As far as player retention, referring to newer players specifically, the current state of wars is the single greatest cost tot he game in new player retention. Just as fatigue was the single largest reason for long-term players.

Any change to any type of gameplay has consequences on retention for older players. The idea is to limit that damage while creating a situation where high sec is less shitty for that change to existing.

50 mill only covers small corps… Usually under 50 people… So now you’ll require that players who login for the PvP and doing boring ass missions to keep what I already want to do just to continue my fun… The game becomes boring if I have to balance now a PvP life with boring missions… Not going to even fly, you’ll lose old players faster… Every good Merc knows you keep your decs going by the loot you get off your kill…

The main problems of highsec are war dodging without consequences, NPC corps that are not engaging or do nothing to encourage content, the lack of a good honest suspect system, ganking mechanics becoming a mainstay instead of face to face PvP…

Literally you don’t have a grasp of what your doing with the War Dec Mechanics at all…

Everything has its costs, now you can just as easily make 1 billion isk going out fragging VNI’s in null to make up the difference in costs, or any other way isk can be made in the sandbox, the examples given are examples of the dramatically low amount of time required to do the base war dec costs by even a single individual. Would you prefer a hard limit on total wars? because that has problems with evasion of wars from corp hopping. There’s no magic bullet here, but its sure as ■■■■ better than proposing wars be based on structures unless you’re into pounding your head into the wall… idk I’m not you, but I’m willing to listen.

I agree the suspect system is pretty trash, NPC corps are not great and war dec dodging are all significant issues.

rolls back into the idea of social groups vs corps which has been a fun discussion over the last few years.

This week we discuss the CSM Winter Summit minutes on the eve of the February 13th patch which brings the Upwell 2.0 Changes, The return to the Guardians Gala Agency Event, and the Assault Frigate Changes / Assault Damage Control. Thanks to Cyclo...

It would be nice to see it change not sure how, but the current system is a bad joke and really only acts as a track when someone dies instead of a reward for fighting. It’s also an issue with how it’s calculated in terms of price of the ship lost. Because it calculates off local market prices. And doesn’t value some items at all.

Try to roll though on the weekends (if elected would put more time towards this) as between discord and slack I can access with ease in the office throughout the week but forums isn’t near as easy and is blocked on the network

I also have a few discords that pick out good threads and talk about them.

As always, I have officially Applied to run for CSM. As a previous approved candidate I dont anticipate any issues with this process. Best of luck to the others and let’s get the election season rolling.

Yes. So I’ve been both attacker and defense in the past but there is no hiding the bias towards defense as I spend years developing a high sec industrial group.

So what has changed, The biggest things is finding areas of common ground in concerns and use the understanding gained from the other perspectives to reshape my original ideas and conceptions of the goals surrounding wars. Specifically there is gameplay within wars that should be preserved and enhanced. And there are pain points that should be addressed for generalized game health.

So I’m going to break this down into the good the bad and some ideas for fixes

So the good.
Things get blown up, Moderate Supply line control (though there is a lot of debate on this as most supply lines are run third party), Wars can create circumstances for escalating fights and generally good content. In the sandbox its always good to be able to knock over some ones sandcastle for a myriad of reasons.

The Bad,
99% of this is caused by secondary effects of changes aimed at other Security Status areas for example the changes to the watchlist are huge. This was a defensive and offensive mechanic that was removed due to its ability to track and hunt supers and titans rapidly. The issue was this was the only remaining mechanic for Intel to be able to limit and track targets based on if they where online. This pairs with locate agents. For instance, Lets say I war dec a 250 man alliance it would take way too long to track all 250 people because I don’t want to track people who are offline. This was the nail in the coffin for hunting.

the death of hunting as a profession in wars leads us to the number one issue in high sec wars. Blanket decing based on creating opportunity targets. so that targets might roll into you. This is why we see trade hub camping or trade lane camping. There is no healthy way to prevent camping a trade lane or a trade hub nore do I want to remove this. The issue is Blanket Decs becoming the norm to generate targets.

Expanding this lets consider what a War does to the Defense. Defense is given 24 hours to prep then tossed into the deep end being vulnerable anywhere they go with no idea anything surround their enemy other than public info and killboards. There are no win conditions, there is no way to effect the situation and the best case scenario for most groups is to take a week vacation and play PubG instead. not generating targets generally leads to the war ending. This is inherently bad mechanics and leads to people leaving EVE. (as a former High Sec alliance Exec I have first hand knowledge of people leaving due to issues with Wars)

How do we build a situation where people can continue to hunt their opponents, but also provide ways that people can exit the engagement area and still gain some content. For example someone has an industry alt with no skills in combat they are not going to fight, they don’t want to fight, and there is no incentive for them to fight. That being said most of these types drop corp and run anyways, from an aggressors side this is a pain especially if that individual is the one that is the target. This makes me think we need a fix to a different mechanic like bounty hunting turning it into a more meaningful mechanic.

So some general ideas
Quote me here “For the love of god don’t tie wars to Upwell structures”

I think this needs a multi pronged approach. to iterate on wars to make the system better.

1 Bring back watch list of some kind or develop a layer for the map to show delayed information on War target movements. potentially requiring surveillance structures to operate the map layer.

2 consider limiting engagement zones form all of high sec to only targeted constellations or regions. (contrary to popular opinion people in high sec generally do set down roots in a specific spot people have to store their shit somewhere)

3 Fix Locate agents This could be a potential fix to watch list possibly adding a line on whether the target is online or not. and Dramatically reducing the response time / or adding ability to run many names at one time with a longer response time.

4 give a way for defense to Win / End a war. As it stands there is no incentive to fight other than structures, most wars do not involve structure attacks. its also important to note most defenders only goal is to not have the war continue.

5 Scaling costs for wars. I’ve been pretty public about wars costing too little bit in small scale you generally don’t see issues with this. 50 mil for 50 or less people for a week is pretty meh but enabling a scaling (exponential? or some other way) cost based on number of consecutive wars. also I think the payment should consider the size of the two groups relative to each other when calculating costs. example a 300 man group wants to war dec 10 guys it should cost more to do it, vs if a 10 man group wants to try and take on 300. This is prime to be abused if not implemented correctly with alt groups starting wars and bringing in people after the wars are made. The Same can be said about defense leaving during a war.

Basically lets create a system that gets people that want to fight fighting, lets find a good way to give defense a reason to fight, and lets most importantly make things change so that logging off or leaving corp isn’t the best answer to get out of it. The system must maintain a way for refuge to leave the engagement area and still gain content, they might have to travel far for it but should still be an option. This would limit response to defensive structure timers and such as they would need to travel through vulnerable space to help defend. Id also argue that incursion areas be exempt from war decs to create a situation where people continue the content but also get caught if they are not careful.

Here’s the big thing, this is a rough idea, as always I maintain a flexibility to new ideas and being shown errors in my ideas. many of these ideas are from the War dec project and represent significant change from my old thinking on the topic.